142 citations · 515 across the 10 of their papers we have counts for
7 papers · 1 filter
Collective behavior of active topological solitons, knotted streamlines, and transport of cargo in liquid crystals
Hayley R. O. Sohn, Paul J. Ackerman, Timothy J. Boyle +3
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging fr…
Diversity of knot solitons in liquid crystals manifested by linking of preimages in torons and hopfions
P. J. Ackerman, I. I. Smalyukh
Topological solitons are knots in continuous physical fields classified by non-zero Hopf index values. Despite arising in theories that span many branches of physics, from elementa…
Reversal of Helicoidal Twist Handedness Near Point Defects of Confined Chiral Liquid Crystals
P. J. Ackerman, I. I. Smalyukh
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecule…
Two-dimensional skyrmions and other solitonic structures in confinement-frustrated chiral nematics
Paul J. Ackerman, Rahul P. Trivedi, Bohdan Senyuk +2
We explore spatially localized solitonic configurations of a director field, generated using optical realignment and laser-induced heating, in frustrated chiral nematic liquid crys…
Shape-dependent oriented trapping and scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects for self-assembly of colloidal dimers in liquid crystals
Bohdan Senyuk, Julian S. Evans, Paul J. Ackerman +6
We demonstrate scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects induced by colloidal microspheres to match their surface boundary conditions with a uniform far-field a…
Optically and elastically assembled plasmonic nanoantennae for spatially resolved characterization of chemical composition in soft matter systems using surface enhanced spontaneous and stimulated Raman scattering
Haridas Mundoor, Taewoo Lee, Derek G. Gann +4
We present a method to locally probe spatially varying chemical composition of soft matter systems by use of optically controlled and elastically self-assembled plasmonic nanoanten…
Threading the Needle: Generating Textures in Nematics
Bryan Gin-ge Chen, Paul J. Ackerman, Gareth P. Alexander +2
The Hopf fibration is an example of a texture: a topologically stable, smooth, global configuration of a field. Here we demonstrate the controlled sculpting of the Hopf fibration i…